Welcome to the LSE Events podcast by the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Get ready to hear from some of the most influential international figures in the social sciences.
Good evening everyone.
I'm Professor Jonathan Birch, Professor of Philosophy at the LSE.
It's a pleasure to welcome you to this event on Saving Britain's Wildlife,
part of the Philosophy Live series,
co-sponsored by LSE's Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science and Global School of Sustainability.
I think of those huge animals that used to live here, woolly mammoths, giant elk, wolves, lynx.
We've not seen that kind of wildlife in this country for a very long time.
But we were, for hundreds of years,
doing pretty well at the small things, particularly wildlife such as insects.
More recently, even very small kinds of wildlife have been under serious threat.
I read recently about survey of Britain's insect populations.
To estimate the insect population, they use the so-called splat count,
which is the number of insects that hit a car's windscreen per mile of driving,
and they do surveys across the country of this splat count,
and just estimated that insect populations have fallen by about 75%.
in 20 years.
So something very bad and worrying has been happening to Britain's wildlife.
But that doesn't mean all hope is lost.